My 5 minutes of fame @ RailsConf
Sven Fuchs gave a presentation of Rails i18n today. And I was in the ‘thank you’ page! :)
Nice to see that Sven also thanked himself :)
Translating Columns
I made this into a plugin: translatable_columns.
Dmitry asked in the comments of my last post about translating ActiveRecord:
Can you write about how to use translated columns of database in rails? For example we have table named ‘blog’, and I want to translate it on several languages: fr, en, ru. How to do that?
And although I don’t think this is the way to go, I can of course demonstrate an easy way to do this, using I18n.
Translating ActiveRecord
Updated October 10th, 2008 to be up to date with Rails 2.2 RC1 release.
With Rails 2.2 releasing any day now, I want to show you how to translate ActiveRecord related stuff. It is quite easy, once you know where to keep your translations. Here is a complete guide to using all built in translation methods!
Contents:
i18n and l10n on r9r 2.2
Updated at October 10th 2008 to be up to date with Rails 2.2 RC1
Ruby on Rails (r9r ;) ) v2.2 ships with builtin internationalization (i18n). It tries to solve the problem dividing the world: language and localization (l10n). This topic is the most annoying of most topics in programming. Anyone who has ever worked with dates, timezones and number formatting has probably been swearing at it, loosing sleep over it and cursing the fact that difference exist between cultures. The idiot that made this decision “I know that they use a comma as delimiter in country X, but in my country we’re going to use a dot!” certainly deserves to be shot, if he (or she) hasn’t already died. And whoever thought of the ridiculous way in how we measure time? Dates and times really suck!
There are two kinds of problems here. If you live in a country other than the US, preferably one where they don’t speak English, and want to make a website, you’re immediately fucked. If you are from any English speaking country, or just don’t care yet, the problem will arise a bit later when you’re expanding beyond the borders.
Making your site in just 1 language is relatively easy. Before Rails 2.2 we had to rely on a lot of monkeypatching, overriding some key parts of the framework. But not anymore. In Rails 2.2, only two lines will fix the problem. Read the rest of this entry »
Finally! Rails goes i18n!
Important!
I18n.store_translations isn’t available anymore and all scopes have changed. Please DON’T use this anymore as a literal guide, because a lot has changed since I wrote this. Don’t use the i18n_yaml plugin, because most of it’s functionality has been merged into Rails. Please look for one of my more recent posts here.
It has been some time, I know. It was a busy time. Since my last post I started working at Finalist IT Group, an exciting company doing exciting projects. Right now I’m doing a very demanding project for Eindhoven city council, which is quite far away from my home (well, in Holland it is anyway).
But time hasn’t stopped. Ruby on Rails is busy advancing to version 2.2. One new feature in the upcoming Rails version has caught my eye and my undivided love and attention. It’s the I18n-module built into Rails! It is already available if you’re running edge.